Case study . Ecommerce & Retail
La Maison du Chocolat reduces the environmental impact of its website with TwicPics
In collaboration with
About La Maison du Chocolat
For the past 45 years, La Maison du Chocolat has been showcasing the creative energy of chocolatier Robert Linxe. This Maison spirit is embodied by 35 passionate chocolate artisans, inspired by Nicolas Cloiseau, Chef Créateur, and Meilleur Ouvrier de France chocolatier.
The Maison's creations are 100% made using traditional French craftsmanship and elaborated in their workshop near Paris. The Maison is committed to selecting the finest cocoa in the world, 100% traced back to the producers, and to assembling noble ingredients. La Maison du Chocolat cultivates a unique taste signature and freedom of expression, giving its chocolates a special place in gastronomy.
In the context of growing environmental awareness, La Maison du Chocolat wanted to improve the user experience of its website while limiting its carbon footprint.
To achieve this dual objective, it turned to the Quanta solution to conduct a thorough analysis of its website and determine optimization levers to reduce its environmental impact and then implemented several optimizations on images with its agency Dn’D thanks to TwicPics.
The challenge
Analyze the carbon footprint of the website with Quanta
As an important growth lever, particularly for international markets, La Maison du Chocolat's e-commerce website has been offering a wide range of creations since 1999, the year of the first website launch. Like any website, it requires material and software resources to function. Therefore, regular maintenance is necessary to maintain a smooth user experience for visitors and to limit the environmental footprint of the site.
According to The Shift Project report on the environmental impact of ICT, greenhouse gas emissions from digital technology have reached 4% of global emissions, the same as civil aviation. To reduce its impact while still benefiting from digital technology, it is important to act on the footprint of each web application.
In this context, La Maison du Chocolat wanted to improve the user experience of its website while limiting its carbon footprint, in order to responsibly engage its digital services in the fight against climate change.
Quanta is a SaaS solution that allows companies to make their website and mobile applications more eco-friendly while improving their performance. The solution provides analyses and tools to improve the user experience on web applications and reduce the carbon footprint of these applications in line with CSR issues.
The methodology used to calculate the site's carbon footprint consisted of measuring the main pages of the site before and after optimization. For this carbon measurement, Quanta used its probes and calculation engine, which is itself based on the Sustainable Web Design method. This method allows for the calculation of the carbon emissions of a website by taking into account several factors such as:
- The amount of data transferred
- The energy source used by the data center
- The carbon intensity of the electricity
- The site traffic on each of the pages affected by the optimizations
By choosing a standardized method and partnering with other industry players, the goal of the carbon measurement provided in Quanta is to encourage the adoption of more eco-friendly practices in web design while making the measurements comparable with other market players.
The TwicPics solution
Image optimization identified by Quanta as one of the main levers for improving results
During the analysis of La Maison du Chocolat website data in Quanta, a very important improvement lever was identified in image optimization. This was particularly the case for three types of pages: Home, Category, and Product pages. Here are their sizes before optimization:
- Home: 2.710 MB for 1.010 MB of images
- Category: 0.626 MB for 0.318 MB of images
- Product: 0.860 MB for 0.612 MB of images
Following the decision to act on the image weight on La Maison du Chocolat's website, the agency Dn'D implemented the TwicPics solution to make image optimization fully automatic.
As a result of this implementation, several immediate benefits were noted: on the one hand, a significant reduction in page weight, and on the other hand, since the URLs of the images have changed, the operation has had another positive impact of relocating the images to TwicPics' data center in France, which has reduced the carbon footprint of delivering these contents to internet users.
Coupled with Hyvä, La Maison du Chocolat online store has now a very performant frontend for an enhanced user experience and lower data consumption.
The results
Reducing page weight by 40% resulting in avoiding 74 tons of CO2eq emissions annually
By adopting eco-design practices, companies can contribute to the fight against climate change while meeting the expectations of their customers and users.
After implementing TwicPics on the La Maison du Chocolat website, a significant decrease in page weight was measured. This can be clearly seen in the graph illustrating the weight of the images on the Home page before and after optimization:
Overall, a weight reduction of 40% on average was observed for all pages, with up to -59% on product pages:
- Home page: originally 2.710 MB, reduced to -0.678 MB after optimization (-25%)
- Category page: originally 0.626 MB, reduced to -0.237 MB after optimization (-37%)
- Product page: originally 0.860 MB, reduced to -0.507 MB after optimization (-59%)
In terms of reducing the carbon footprint, the optimization had a double effect: not only was the weight of the images greatly reduced, but their hosting site was moved from the Netherlands to France, where the electricity powering the data centers is significantly less carbon-intensive at equivalent power:
The result of this reduction in environmental impact applied to the entire site is significant, especially since the gains have been achieved permanently. Indeed, now every visit has become lighter, more resource-efficient, and the resulting user experience is only better.
The overall result is an annual energy saving of 108,000 kWh. To grasp the magnitude of this saving, it can be translated into one of the following three equivalents:
- The use of an electric kettle 24 hours a day for 1500 days.
- 809,000 km traveled by a medium-sized electric car, or 20 times around the globe.
- Lighting a room with an LED lamp for 1300 years
In terms of carbon emissions, the total saved amounts to 74 tonnes of CO2eq per year, which can also be expressed as:
- The consumption of 185,500 vegetarian meals
- The consumption of 10,600 meals with beef
- The purchase of 2,380 smartphones
This initiative illustrates the importance of considering the environmental footprint of digital technology in the design and maintenance of websites and mobile applications.
